When local Los Angeles artist Edward Kienholz debuted Back Seat Dodge at the Dwan Gallery in 1964, the life-size sculpture with two mannequins simulating sex in the back seat of a car inspired both chuckles and praise.

It’s not often that original vintage copies of a rare and historic gallery announcement card suddenly appear. But this is exactly what happened with a highly prized 1982 card printed by the Annina Nosei Gallery to promote Jean-Michel Basquiat’s print portfolio Anatomy.

For Bill Cunningham (1929 – 2016) and Toyo Tsuchiya (1948 – 2017) the term “street photography” is not limited to pictures taken on the street but also includes photographs of events and performances. Both photographers were part of a trend among artists in the 1980s to document and archive the…

A vintage exhibition poster is an especially good way to preserve a moment of art history. Posters are large, they can be framed and hung on the wall, and the best feature images and words in ways that effectively reveal the essence of an artist’s work at a specific time and place. Gallery…

At Gallery 98 our diverse inventory includes many DIY flyers from downtown art spaces in the 1970s and 80s, mostly hand-lettered and cheaply printed on black-and-white xerox machines. Commercial galleries, on the other hand, hired designers, and used color-offset printers to produce the cards and posters that promoted their exhibitions.

With the expansion of the artworld in the 1980s and 90s, art magazines became an increasingly important tool to reach global audiences. Artforum, with its high international circulation, quality printing and paper, and distinctive 10 ½ x 10 ½ square format, was particularly popular among galleries wanting to advertise.

Art ephemera is primarily a by-product of advertising and promotion. At Gallery 98 our main focus is announcement cards and gallery posters but we also have an interest in the advertisements that galleries place in art magazines. It is all part of our long-term ambition to make the Gallery 98…

Today Gallery 98 promotes all kinds of art ephemera from the US and Europe, but its original focus was on the alternative art scene that emerged in the East Village and the Lower East Side in the 1970s and 80s. The Italian magazine Kaleidoscope, just now published a…

When Marlene Dumas was commissioned to design a coaster for Café Schiller, a popular bar in Amsterdam, she found her inspiration in Charles Baudelaire’s poem, Be Drunk. The poem resonated with Dumas, whose youth was spent on her family’s vineyard in South Africa, and whose personal “drunkenness” of choice has always been art making.

All our newsletters going back to 2015 are posted on the Gallery 98 site. Our focus is on the art from the last half of the 20th century as illustrated on gallery announcements, posters, catalogues and other art ephemera. Chock-full of information and unique visuals, these newsletters continue to be prominently featured…

Gallery 98’s rich inventory of announcement cards from Light, the pioneering photography gallery, are now featured in a new online exhibition Light Gallery & Fine Arts Photography, 1971 – 1987. Over its seventeen-year history, Light helped define the genre of art photography and launched many of its leading practitioners.

Collecting vintage art ephemera is a way to own a piece of art history.  A top tier announcement card – with an image, the name of the artist, the gallery, and the exhibition date – is more than memorabilia. Carefully curated collections of art ephemera allow art enthusiasts to trace…

It’s not easy for Gallery 98 to keep vintage art ephemera in stock. The best items sell quickly, and it’s becoming harder to find great new ones to replace what has sold. Fortunately, there are art lovers like Bodi Lucas, who back in the 1980s amassed a large collection of gallery cards and publications…

The revival of painting that took place in the 1980s moved in many directions but the term that most appropriately defined and marketed this change was Neo-Expressionism. In New York, the Mary Boone Gallery was the headquarters for the movement, especially after she teamed up with Michael Werner whose Cologne gallery…

The 1988 announcement card (above) from a Metro Pictures exhibition featuring eleven successful women artists illustrates the gender diversification that was slowly taking hold in the art world in the 1980s.

It was big news back in December 1983 when the venerable Sidney Janis Gallery mounted the exhibition Post-Graffiti featuring canvases by top urban street artists. The embrace of graffiti culture was an unexpected and surprising turn for a gallery first established in 1948 and famous in the artworld for its exhibitions of…

Over the years Christo and Jean-Claude’s wrappings have frequently been at a colossal scale and involved prominent public structures. These projects are by necessity short term (usually two weeks) but they live on through copious documentation created by the artists themselves.

The 1970s was a particularly fertile moment for new art movements. With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972 – 1985, an exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College (through November 28th), spotlights one of the most distinctive — the Pattern and Decoration movement (also known as P&D).

The success of Pop Art in the 1960s opened the way for other new styles of representational art. “Photorealism” was a term applied to a group of artists whose fastidious paintings strove to imitate photography. Like pop artists, photorealists favored imagery drawn from everyday life and the American vernacular. OK Harris Gallery and the …

Depending on your age, collecting vintage art ephemera is either nostalgic or educational. Since Gallery 98’s founding over five years ago, we have amassed a huge collection of art gallery cards and posters covering the years 1964 to 2001. Although our specialty is the art of downtown New York,…

When a collection of art ephemera only includes items from American galleries it inevitably does not convey the full picture. During the final decades of the 20th century Europe was not only the birthplace of important artists (e.g., Christo, Marina Abramović, Anselm Kiefer) but it was also a key market for American artists. Gallery 98’s goal is to capture…

Selected issues of the German Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) magazine from the 1990s are today coveted collector items because of the publication’s radical decision to give famous artists editorial control in the design of the magazine’s cover, as well as lengthy picture spreads featuring whatever images they chose.

Last week the art world was fixated on the death of Chuck Close, a pioneer photorealist painter who was also connected with conceptual and post-minimal art. As one of the most celebrated artists from the 1970’s, Close’s personal story also fueled media interest.

Art ephemera plays a particularly important role in promoting performance art. Not only are announcement cards and flyers a key factor in attracting audiences for these short duration events, they also live on after the performance, and are sometimes the only surviving record of what took place. Here is…

Neke Carson has always had his ardent advocates. A pioneer performance artist with roots in Fluxus, Conceptual Art and Pop, Carson has had an unusual and remarkably varied career.

In the 1970s and 80s the number of young artists hoping for careers in New York far exceeded the opportunities available through the city’s commercial galleries. This in no way deterred the truly committed who redirected much of their creativity to DIY outlets and events that catered primarily to friends and other artists. Gallery…

There are so many engaging items among the 5,000 examples of art ephemera posted on Gallery 98 that it is sometimes difficult to decide what to feature in our weekly newsletter. This assortment of favorites was chosen to appeal to a broad range of tastes and interests.

Best known now as the inspiration for the fictional bar Hi Hat in the television serial The Deuce, Tin Pan Alley (1978-88), located on West 49 Street in Times Square, was also an artist hangout and exhibition place. Founded by Maggie Smith in 1978 in a neighborhood where the sex industry flourished, the bar took…

If one wanted to encapsulate with a single work the spirit of the downtown art scene in the late 1970s, an appropriate choice might be Beth B & Scott B’s independent film The Offenders. A “savage satire” full of violence and nihilism, this low budget Super 8 film embodies the period’s…

In the 1970s and 80s Diego Cortez né James Curtis was a conspicuous downtown trendsetter. His stylish good looks, ability to forge relationships with top talents, and a confident air that at times bordered on snobbishness lent an important boost to selected artists and musicians exploring new creative directions during…

It is not surprising that a transient art form like graffiti has inspired so many books. Whether this new kind of art was created on the streets or in the subways, most of the key early examples that brought attention to the phenomenon in the 1970s and 80s…

The multi-talented BLADE was also a prolific photographer who documented his work in over 10,000 pictures. In the early 1970s when graffiti was not yet targeted by the police, the extroverted artist was not shy about posing in front of his trains and distributing photographs to friends like Glazer.

The recent death of artist Mary Beth Edelson in April calls attention not only to her importance as an artist, but also to the wide variety of groundbreaking achievements of the women’s art movement, and the many feminist artists who emerged in the 1970s. …

Business cards are a well-established and well-regarded category of paper collectible. Both the Smithsonian and the Victoria and Albert Museum holdings include many such cards. Like any other business, art-world enterprises use this mode of advertising often with some added artistic flair.

Mary-Ann Monforton arrived in New York in 1974 settling into the East Village when it was still in the depths of decay. It did not take long for her to become part of the lively downtown art world with its parties, clubs and openings. There were a variety of short-lived jobs before…

Gallery 98 is on Instagram.  Each day we post new images from our extensive inventory of announcement cards, posters, flyers, photographs and multiples connected to the downtown New York art world from the 1960’s through 2000.  Gallery 98 is a resource for both collectors and researchers.  Follow us on Instagram at …

Robert Colescott’s gaudily colored, densely packed, transgressive, cartoon-like paintings continue to garner surprising success. …

Stefan Eins’s storefront at 3 Mercer Street pointedly called itself a store, not a gallery.  Doubling as Eins’s illegal living quarters with a bed hidden behind a screen, the space (which operated from 1974 – 1979) epitomized the provocative DIY populism that made Downtown New York such a creative cauldron in the 1970s.

Jean-Michel Basquiat has a big presence on Gallery 98 in part because Marc H. Miller, the founder of the site, knew Basquiat, and conducted the very first interview with him in November 1982. …

As much inventor as artist, de Montebello developed a new type of camera that produced individual transparencies each consisting of 2,644 separate exposures. When such a transparency is seen through a “lens-viewing screen” (another invention of de Montebello’s), the multiple exposures merge into a single 3-D image that changes depending on…

In the 1960s and 1970s Ray Johnson was a familiar presence at art events handing out photocopy announcements with unusual designs, and collecting addresses for future mail-art networking. Artistically, Johnson can be classified as part of the Fluxus and Conceptual art movements, but his hard to decipher, sui generis messaging,…

Given the cautious nature of today’s art world it’s refreshing to remember a time when museum’s actually courted controversy. The Brooklyn Museum must have suspected there would be trouble when they brought Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection to New York in 1999.

Opening an art gallery in the 1980s was easy. Rents were low and there was no shortage of talented artists looking for places to show. In hindsight, it’s surprising to see how many now historic exhibitions were held in small, raw spaces run by neophyte dealers on a shoestring budget. The art world was ready for new things. All it…

One of the most conspicuous developments in downtown New York in the late 1970s was the decision by many young artists to start making low- budget, narrative films. This was part of a broader embrace of popular media, as many of these filmmakers were also active in rock bands.

The recent announcement that Metro Pictures art gallery will close at the end of 2021 stirs memories about how this once small gallery, founded in 1980 by Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer, got off to a roaring start with a quick succession of exhibitions featuring now famous artists whose work continues to command art-world respect. Countering…

Gallery 98 has a special connection to the artist group Collaborative Projects Inc. (COLAB).  Old announcement cards, flyers and early multiples by artists connected to the group make up a significant part of our inventory.

In the same celebratory spirit as Great Day in Harlem, the famous group portrait of jazz musicians, Tea Party at the Algonguin Hotel salutes women artists as a newly empowered creative force. This iconic image was created to promote Show of Strength, a benefit exhibition for MADRE, an organization working with women to address humanitarian needs around the…

Invitations, posters and other nightclub ephemera document the important role that clubs played in the creative spirit of Downtown NYC in the 1980s. The Mudd Club, Club 57, AREA, Danceteria, Palladium and other clubs were key venues for curators, performance artists, photographers, filmmakers and clothing designers. Gallery 98 spotlights some of these club stars…